Comment Re:Nice conclusion (part of conclusion copied) (Score 1) 480
Compilation is very lossy when it comes to meaning and communication. The main point of a structured high-level language is to allow organization of programs in ways that make sense to humans (i.e. abstracted, layered, and modularized).
The CPU doesn't care about modules and layers, and in fact any good optimizing compiler will make these conceptual boundaries much more difficult to see (thanks to automatic inlining, peephole optimizations, and a million other things). A simple example: an optimizing compiler will rearrange and permute arithmetic operations in ways that obfuscate their intents, but make them more efficient to execute.
Certainly, object code conveys information and can be intelligible to (determined) humans. But it's hard to see the "communications medium" argument since almost any other form of the program--even just assembly language--is a preferable way to describe the program to another human.
The CPU doesn't care about modules and layers, and in fact any good optimizing compiler will make these conceptual boundaries much more difficult to see (thanks to automatic inlining, peephole optimizations, and a million other things). A simple example: an optimizing compiler will rearrange and permute arithmetic operations in ways that obfuscate their intents, but make them more efficient to execute.
Certainly, object code conveys information and can be intelligible to (determined) humans. But it's hard to see the "communications medium" argument since almost any other form of the program--even just assembly language--is a preferable way to describe the program to another human.
